Pages

Friday, December 20, 2013

Kerry forces Israel’s moment of decision. By Caroline Glick. Jerusalem Post, December 16, 2013. Also at CarolineGlick.com.Glick:Facing the Palestinians’ continued defiance
of the very notion of peaceful coexistence with Israel, Kerry is planning to
present his own peace deal next month and try to force Israel to accept
it.

There
was a ghoulish creepiness to US Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit to Israel
last week. Here we were, beset by the greatest winter storm in a hundred years.
All roads to Jerusalem were sealed off. Tens of thousands of Jerusalemites and
residents of surrounding areas were locked down in their houses, without power,
heat, telephone service or water.

And all
of the sudden, out of nowhere, Kerry appeared. As Hamas-ruled Gazans begged the
supposedly hated IDF to come and save them from the floods, and as Israel took
over rescue operations for stranded Palestinians living under the rule of the
PLO ’s gangster kleptocracy in Judea and Samaria, here was Kerry, telling us
that we’d better accept the deal he plans to present us next month, or face the
wrath of the US and Europe, and suffer another Palestinian terror war.

What is
going on? Why can’t Kerry leave Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the rest
of the country alone, even for a week, in the middle of a blizzard of biblical
proportions? According to leaks from the now five month old negotiations, after
20 rounds of talks, the Palestinians have not budged from the positions they
have held to for the past 50 years. They do not accept Israel’s right to exist.
They do not recognize the existence of the Jewish people. They do not believe
that the Jews have the right to freedom or self-determination. They insist on
taking control of our 3,000 year old capital. They demand that we surrender our
ability to defend ourselves from foreign aggression and Palestinian attacks and
infiltration from the east.

There
is nothing new here, of course, This was the case 13 years ago at the Camp
David summit. This was the case during the Annapolis summit in 2007 and 2008.

This
was the case when PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas rejected then prime minister Ehud
Olmert’s offer of peace in 2008.

Facing
the Palestinians’ continued defiance of the very notion of peaceful coexistence
with Israel, Kerry is planning to present his own peace deal next month and try
to force Israel to accept it. Although the text of Kerry’s deal has not yet
been revealed, we know exactly what it will involve just by listening to what
he has already told us.

In his
speech at the Saban Forum on December 7, Kerry said, “For many years the broad
contours of an eventual solution have been absolutely clear, and they were
crystallized for the world in December of 2000 when president Clinton laid down
the parameters for a final-status agreement. They were reaffirmed through the
Annapolis process during the Bush administration.”

The
Clinton parameters involved a near complete American embrace of the PLO ’s
maximalist demands. The Annapolis guidelines went even further in the PLO ’s
direction.

And
now, Kerry intends to put forth his own parameters that will be even more
forthcoming to the PLO than either the Clinton or Bush administrations were.

Like
the Clinton and Bush plans, the Kerry parameters will involve Israeli surrender
of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount to the PLO , which rejects the historical
fact that two Jewish temples were built at the site that was and remains the cradle
of Jewish civilization and history and holiest site to Judaism.

They
will involve the mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews from their
homes in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to make room for an anti-Semitic,
Jew-free state that maintains its devotion to the destruction of the rump
Jewish state.

Kerry’s
framework deal will involve the mass immigration of hundreds of thousands of
foreign-born Arabs, who have been living in al-Qaida-, Hamas- and PLO
-controlled UN-run “refugee camps,” for the past four generations.

Kerry’s
plan will require Israeli society to destroy its cohesion through the
dismemberment and destruction of hundreds of Jewish communities. As occurred
before the Gaza withdrawal, it will require the government to oversee the demonization
and criminalization of well over three million law abiding, patriotic Israeli
citizens who oppose the mass expulsions.

Kerry’s
parameters will require Israel to surrender its ability to defend itself
against foreign aggression and Palestinian attacks. As for the Palestinians,
implementation of the Kerry parameters will guarantee that all moderate
elements in their society, including among Israeli Arabs, will be overwhelmed
and destroyed. The PLO state in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, like the Hamas
state in Gaza, will be breeding grounds for global jihadists. They will
actively incite, organize and oversee an armed insurrection of the Arabs of the
Galilee and the Negev, meting out punishment for all dissenters.

As for
the US forces that Kerry proposes deploying to the Jew-free PLO state, they
will be targeted by the Palestinians, just as the Palestinians and the Syrians
attacked US Marines in Beirut 30 years ago. And like the Marines in Beirut,
they will be withdrawn in humiliation and defeat, but the lesson – that the
Arabs perceive the Americans and Jews as enemies of equal weight – will not be
learned. And, at any rate, unable to defend itself after agreeing to Kerry’s
parameters, Israel will cease to be a strategic ally and be transformed into a
strategic basket case. Its destruction will interest Kerry and his supporters
just as much as the destruction of South Vietnam interested them in 1975.

Aside
from being a more anti-Israel version of the Clinton parameters and Bush’s
framework, Kerry’s parameters, and framework deal, have one other unique and
particularly dangerous feature. Until now, US peace plans followed former prime
minister Ehud Barak’s dictum that “nothing is agreed to until everything is
agreed to.”

That
is, no hypothetical Israeli concession on Jerusalem, for instance, will be
binding unless a final deal is concluded.

Kerry
indicated at the Saban Forum that his goal is to coerce Israel into making
irrevocable concessions up front, before the Palestinians agree to peaceful
coexistence.

As he
put it, “A basic framework will have to address all the core issues – borders,
security, refugees, Jerusalem, mutual recognition, and an end of claims. And it
will have to establish agreed guidelines for subsequent negotiations that will
fill out the details in a full-on peace treaty.”

For the
past five and a half years, Netanyahu’s strategy for dealing with US President
Barack Obama has been to try to survive him. He’s withstood Obama’s constant
demand for Israeli national suicide for “peace” by giving the bare minimum of
revocable concession possible to keep Obama at bay.

But
with Kerry poised to shove his lethal parameters down our throats, parameters
that will require Israel to irrevocably accept terms of peace that will destroy
the country, it is obvious that Netanyahu needs to adopt a longer-term
strategy. Our goal cannot be limited to waiting out Obama. Our goal must be to
extricate Israel from the two-state trap.

Yes,
Israel will pay a huge price for jumping ship. For 20 years, non-leftist
Israeli leaders have been trying to go along to get along with the Left, and
the Americans and their ever-escalating demands. But Kerry’s obsessive harping,
and his insistence on pushing forward with his disastrous framework deal forces
our hand.

Either
we pay a huge price now, or accept our destruction within five to 15 years.

Obama’s four-state solution. By Caroline B. Glick. Jerusalem Post, December 9, 2013. Also at CarolineGlick.com.Glick:Israel has no reason to withdraw from Judea
and Samaria. Absorbing the areas into sovereign Israel will not endanger the
country demographically.

Inadvertently,
President Barack Obama just made an important contribution to our understanding
of the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

Since
Hamas ousted all PLO forces from the Gaza Strip in 2007, Gaza has operated as a
separate political entity from Judea and Samaria. Indeed, it has been a de
facto independent Palestinian state, controlled by Hamas.

Gaza’s
only connection to Judea and Samaria has been financial. Every month, the
PLO-controlled Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria transfers tens of
millions of dollars in US and other international donor funds to Gaza to
finance the terror state.

Despite
the clear distinction between the two areas, the US and the rest of the world
have continued to insist that an Israeli-PLO peace deal will cover Gaza as well
as Judea and Samaria. Obama always insists that a future Palestinian state must
be “territorially contiguous,” meaning in a final deal Israel will be required
to cut itself in half in order to give the Palestinians a land corridor
connecting Gaza with Judea and Samaria.

But
during his remarks at the Saban Forum on Saturday, Obama let the cat out of the
bag. Gaza, he admitted, is a separate entity. A peace deal, he explained, “is
going to have to happen in stages.”

As he
sees it, a peace deal will involve an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and
Samaria. A post-Israel Judea and Samaria will be so wonderful that the Gazans
will decide to join it.

Obama
explained, “If there is a model where young Palestinians in Gaza are looking
and seeing that in the West Bank Palestinians are able to live in dignity, with
self-determination, and suddenly their economy is booming and trade is taking place
because they have created an environment in which Israel is confident about its
security and a lot of the old barriers to commerce and educational exchange and
all that has begun to break down, that’s something that the young people of
Gaza are going to want. And the pressure that will be placed for the residents
of Gaza to experience that same future is something that is going to be I think
overwhelmingly appealing.”

Before
considering whether Gazans will likely behave as Obama expects them to, we need
to consider the implications of his assertion that Gaza will not be
automatically included in a peace deal.

Israelis
and Palestinians engage one another for different reasons. Israelis are told we
need to engage the Palestinians because they pose a demographic threat to our
continued viability as a Jewish state.

In his
remarks at the Saban Forum, Secretary of State John Kerry claimed that the
Palestinian “demographic time bomb” is an existential threat on the level of
Iran’s nuclear weapons program. If we don’t vacate Judea and Samaria as we
vacated Gaza, he warned, we will be doomed as a Jewish nation state.

For the
Palestinians, the peace process is supposed to lead to a satisfaction of their
assumed yearning for self-determination as a nation.

Israeli
demographics and Palestinian nationalism have been the basic assumptions upon
which the peace process has been based. But the Obama-recognized fact that Gaza
is a separate political entity demonstrates the emptiness of both.

The
truth is that the “demographic time bomb” is a PLO-concocted lie. In its 1997
census, the PLO falsified its data and inflated the number of Palestinians by
50 percent.

They
then projected natural growth and immigration rates that bore no relation
whatsoever to reality.

In truth,
demography is one of Israel’s strongest advantages, not an existential threat.
Were Israel to absorb the Palestinian populations of Gaza and Judea and Samaria
tomorrow, Israel’s Jewish majority would be reduced from 78% to well over 50%.
While Israel’s Jewish identity would not be in doubt, it would be weakened.

On the
other hand, without Gaza, there is no demographic threat to Israel’s Jewish
majority. If Israel applies its sovereignty over Judea and Samaria and offers a
path to citizenship to its Palestinian residents, Israel would still retain a
two-thirds Jewish majority. And if current fertility and immigration rates
hold, within 15 to 20 years, Jews could well restore their 80 percent majority
overall.

Then
there is the Palestinian nationalism issue.

Obama’s
acknowledgement that Gazans will have to be convinced to join a Palestinian
state in Judea and Samaria exposes the lie at the heart of it. Since the League
of Nations assigned both sides of the Jordan River to the Jewish people in
1922, the international community has insisted that the path to peace will be
forged by taking land from the Jews and giving it to the Arabs.

First
we had a two-state solution when Jordan, with its overwhelming Palestinian
majority, was carved out of the Jewish territory.

For the
past 20 years, we have been told that we need a three-state solution with
another Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

Since
the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, we have had two Palestinian states – in Gaza
and Jordan. And yet, the Gazans who we are told are motivated by nationalist
aspirations have refused to declare an independent Palestinian state in Gaza.
And now Obama is talking about a four-state solution – three Palestines and one
rump Israel.

The
Palestinians’ refusal to ever view the areas under their control as the focus
of their nationalist aspirations indicates that there is something awry in the
international community’s assumption that the Palestinians are motivated by
nationalist aspirations.

And
that brings us to Obama’s projection that once the Gazans see how great things
are in post-Israel Judea and Samaria, they will join the peace train. We’ve
been told things like this before.

In 1993
we were told that the Palestinians as a whole would embrace peace once Israel
recognized the PLO and allowed it to set up an autonomous government in Judea,
Samaria and Gaza. In the event, the Palestinians became more violent and
radicalized and anti-Jewish under PLO rule, until in 2006 they elected Hamas to
lead them.

In 2005
we were told that once Israel vacated Gaza, the Gazans would abandon their war
against Israel and use their energies to transform Gaza into a Middle Eastern
Singapore. Instead they transformed it into a Middle Eastern Afghanistan.

In
2007, after Hamas ousted the PLO from Gaza, we were told that the international
community would pour so much money into the PLO-run PA in Judea and Samaria
that the Gazans would decide that they want the PLO back. Instead, Hamas has
grown more popular in Judea and Samaria.

In
other words, there is no reason to think Obama’s sunny projection is correct.

Clearly
without meaning to, Obama told us the truth.

There
is no demographic time bomb. Israel has no reason to withdraw from Judea and
Samaria. Absorbing the areas into sovereign Israel will not endanger the
country demographically.

And the
fact that the Gazans do not see themselves as part of a Palestinian state in
Judea and Samaria, (or in Jordan), shows that the Palestinian national movement
is not what it has been billed as. Obama’s four-state solution is not about
demography or Palestinian nationalism.

It is
about making up reasons to force Israel to surrender its strategic and historic
heartland.

Top Fossil Provides Complete Neanderthal Genome. By Carl Zimmer. New York Times, December 18, 2013.Archaic humans: Four makes a party. By Ewan Birney and Jonathan K. Pritchard. Nature, published online, December 18, 2013.The complete genome sequence of Neanderthal from the Altai Mountains. By Kay Prüfer et al. Nature, published online, December 18, 2013.Abstract:We
present a high-quality genome sequence of a Neanderthal woman from Siberia. We
show that her parents were related at the level of half-siblings and that
mating among close relatives was common among her recent ancestors. We also
sequenced the genome of a Neanderthal from the Caucasus to low coverage. An
analysis of the relationships and population history of available archaic
genomes and 25 present-day human genomes shows that several gene flow events
occurred among Neanderthals, Denisovans and early modern humans, possibly
including gene flow into Denisovans from an unknown archaic group. Thus,
interbreeding, albeit of low magnitude, occurred among many hominin groups in
the Late Pleistocene. In addition, the high-quality Neanderthal genome allows
us to establish a definitive list of substitutions that became fixed in modern
humans after their separation from the ancestors of Neanderthals and
Denisovans.

A
possible model of gene flow events in the Late Pleistocene. The direction and
estimated magnitude of inferred gene flow events are shown. Branch lengths and
timing of gene flows are not drawn to scale. The dashed line indicates that it
is uncertain if Denisovan gene flow into modern humans in mainland Asia
occurred directly or via Oceania. D.I. denotes the introgressing Denisovan,
N.I. the introgressing Neanderthal. Note that the age of the archaic genomes
precludes detection of gene-flow from modern humans into the archaic hominins.